Storm Hawks Extended Universe
by Sojourney
Summary: A series of Stork-centric backstory and series companion fics, loosely inspired by 100prompts on Livejournal.
1. Coincidental Fate

**Storm Hawks Extended Universe**

A series of (mostly Stork-centric) backstory and episode companion fics, loosely inspired by 100prompts on Livejournal. Written in no particular order, copious use of headcanon, shameless amounts of adoration for this series. Cross-posted at AO3.

* * *

**Coincidental Fate (#59 - Destiny)  
Notes: **Set directly following episode 46, "Origins".  
**Summary:** Aerrow reflects on the Guardian's prophecy, and Stork inadvertently complicates things.

_"Well... these bird guys interrupted me while I was defending our home against a squad  
__of Cyclonian wannabes, __to tell me I'm a Sky Knight. And so we came here to find the  
__Condor, rebuild the Storm Hawks, and fulfill some kind of Atmos-saving destiny?"  
_

* * *

Aerrow draped the blanket gently over Radarr, not wanting to wake his co-pilot, before tiptoeing out of his room. Or at least, the room he'd ended up with once the scuffle for the Condor's living quarters had settled. The corridors of the ship were dimly lit with the ship's standby lights, and with the exception of the reverberating sound of snoring coming from not one, but two quarters — Finn's _and_ Junko's — only the nasal metallic creaking of the mooring lines echoed through the metal hull as he made his way toward the bridge. He hadn't been able to sleep, and the last several hours of anxious tossing and turning had left him too on edge to keep trying.

He was surprised to find the wheelhouse port, leading out to the narrow deck that ran the perimeter of the bridge, open... and occupied.

"Hey Stork," Aerrow said quietly, but winced as the merb jumped and spun around to face him, hands reaching back to grip the railing. "Sorry for startling you," he added apologetically. He'd already begun to realize that their new carrier pilot was even more high-strung than their initial impressions had suggested. "Couldn't sleep?" he asked, hoping the conversation would help.

Stork twitched, but gingerly unwound his four digits from the railing as he shook his head. "I'm a chronic insomniac," he stated flatly. "Besides, I'm used to having the Condor to myself. Having other people on board is... loud."

Aerrow uttered an awkward laugh, rubbing a hand through his red hair. "Yeah, Finn does kinda snore a lot. Junko too, apparently. You get used to it though, you'll tune it out in no time."

The green-skinned pilot responded with an unimpressed "hnnh" and turned back to face the open air again. The breeze had picked up, swinging the mooring lines in graceful, swooping arches, black against the starlight.

"I was surprised when you had said that it was better for the Condor to remain suspended when at rest," Aerrow said, folding his arms in front of him and matching Stork's lean on the balcony edge as he watched the cables. "I'd always assumed carriers landed when they weren't actively flying."

"The new ones do," Stork replied with a shrug of his narrow shoulders. "But the Condor was built before the anti-grav crystals used in dry docks were reliable. They tended to short out at inopportune moments, and drop half-built ships on whoever was unlucky enough to be standing beneath them— _splat_." He smirked a little at Aerrow's wince before continuing, "The Condor's trestle structure was never all that well designed, it puts a lot of stress on the landing gear. I had to reinforce stanchions pretty early on when I was rebuilding her. So, mooring lines."

That was the most the Aerrow had heard Stork talk about anything that wasn't infectious since they'd met, and the fondness for the carrier was audible in the pilot's tone. Without realizing it, Aerrow's grimace had reverted back to a smile. "You know a lot about the Condor," he said. Even as he spoke, he recalled Piper's radio transmission from a few days ago, when the leecher crystal had sent the Condor plunging down towards the Wastelands once again.

_"Stork, it's not worth it! You need to bail out!"_  
_"Uh-uh... this pilot goes down with his ship!"_

That kind of dedication was rarely seen in even the most tenured of Sky Knights, and Aerrow felt secure that, the merb's quirks aside, they had made the right choice in offering him a place on the team. Aerrow suddenly registered that Stork was staring at him expectantly, and realized that in his musing, he'd missed whatever the green one had asked him. "Uh, sorry. What was the question?"

"I said, was Finn the reason you couldn't sleep either?"

"_Oh_. No, I, we- the three of us, we've all been together for years, I can sleep right through it now." Aerrow raked a hand through his hair a second time, shaking his head absently. "I just... can't get what those bird guys said about me out of my head. I mean, 'the last descendant'? That's pretty far-fetched, you know?"

"Not really," Stork replied candidly. "I can see where they were going with the family resemblance part."

"I... _what_?"

The merb blinked large yellow eyes at Aerrow's bafflement, and the two of them stared at each other for a moment. "What 'what'?"

"What do you mean, a family resemblance," Aerrow repeated, and for the first time since they'd met, Stork saw that the teenager was rattled. For a moment, the merb debated the wisdom of trying to play off the remark as nothing, but if Aerrow was already sleepless now, the likelihood that he'd simply drop the subject was low.

"I'm going to go out on a thermal here and guess you've never seen a picture of the original Storm Hawks," he said finally, even though he already knew the answer. When Aerrow shook his head, Stork heaved a sigh that seemed too big to be contained in his skinny frame, and pushed back from the railing. "Follow me."

He led Aerrow back through the bridge and down the Condor's corridors to one of the cargo storage holds. Even though he'd given them all a tour of the carrier initially, there were several areas he'd glossed over as having things like "supply rations", "survival kits", and a generic "odds and ends" — this hold contained the latter. There were heavy duty crates stacked in many piles against the walls, and Stork went over to one without hesitation. Aerrow hung near the doorway, feeling an unsettled flutter in the pit of his stomach, and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

"Stork?"

The merb was sorting, lifting crates down with surprising ease, though Aerrow could see that they were all heavy. Muttering under his breath about some kind of thieving beetle, he finally located what he was searching for, pulling the top off boxes inside. "Here we go," he said to himself, as if he'd all but forgotten the redhead in the room. Shuffling through papers, he finally produced a newspaper clipping. Turning around, he held it out to Aerrow, who took and unfolded it.

**_STORM HAWKS PREVENT INVASION OF TERRA ELASTIS!_** read the bold headline, and detailed the squadron's routing of a Cyclonian settlement troop which had intended to establish an outpost on the resource-rich terra. Aerrow vaguely remembered hearing about it after the fact; it had happened when he was very young — from the date on the clipping, less than a year old.

But the methods that the Storm Hawks had used, mostly tricks of deception and guile rather than matching force for force, had been retold for years afterward. Yet it was not the content of the article that made him stare hard at the paper, but the grainy image of the celebrating squad, with a tall man centered in the middle: the cocksure grin, the playful salute at the photographer, the way the rest of the team clustered near him like he was a center of gravity. The old clipping was in black and white, but he knew unequivocally what colour that messy shock of hair was.

Aerrow stared at the paper, until he felt like everything outside of the cargo bay had stopped existing. "That's..." Aerrow began, only to trail off helplessly.

"Lightning Strike, leader of the Storm Hawks," Stork finished, watching him closely with his arms folded loosely over each other while the famous name seemed to almost reverberate through the hold. After a moment of letting that sink in, he continued in a quiet tone. "Given your age and... the timing, you'd have to be his son, to look so much alike. No one ever...?"

Aerrow shook his head, half to answer and half hoping it would dislodge the phantom ringing in his ears. "We're all orphans," he said, gesturing numbly in the direction of the crew quarters to indicate Piper and Finn's rooms, and Radarr in his own. "It's always been just us. I mean, I think Finn knew his mom, but—" He broke off, sitting down heavily on the nearest crate, the newspaper pulled taut to near-ripping in his hands without his notice. "I don't— this doesn't make_ any_ sense."

Stork maintained his silence, not comfortable interrupting Aerrow's unwelcome epiphany. Yet when it seemed like the teen wasn't going to say anything further without some kind of prompting, he offered lamely, "There's always a... chance that it's just a coincidence."

Aerrow laughed suddenly, but it was an incredulous and unsteady sound. "That'd be one hell of a coincidence, Stork. No, I... it's just a bit much." He looked back up at the merb suddenly, and there was alarm in his green eyes. "Can you not tell the others? I don't— this isn't the _reason_ I wanted to do this, the Storm Hawks thing, so it'll... be weird," he finished awkwardly. He'd never been very good at articulating his thoughts, especially when he was flustered, and this was as off-balance as he'd ever felt in his whole life. It was one thing to find out that he'd discovered the identity of a parent he hadn't known, but for that parent to be _Lightning Strike_ of all people...

Suddenly Aerrow wanted to find the Guardian birds and wring a few more answers from them.

The pilot tilted his head slightly, ears flicking back as if testing the steady sound of snoring from down the corridors, and then back. "It's going to come out eventually," he said, neither in agreement nor denial of the request. "You guys may have been isolated on Neverlandis, but the Condor's the most famous ship in all the Atmos. She's going to attract attention anywhere we go, and someone's going to point out the similarity sooner or later."

"I know," Aerrow answered heavily. While he didn't like the idea of keeping secrets from his friends either, he needed some time with this to process. "But I'm gonna... think, about it, I guess. Please?"

Stork shrugged, bony shoulders lifting in acknowledgement. "Doesn't matter to me, it's not my business, anyway." At Aerrow's silent sag of relief, he intercepted the reply the teen had been about to offer. "Don't thank me for it, _you're_ the one who's going to have to eventually explain it. Like I said, not my business."

The redhead's mouth quirked wryly. "Merbs are clairvoyant too?"

"Of course not," Stork replied, yellow eyes glinting with dark amusement in the overhead bay lights before he moved towards the stacked crates to begin replacing the boxes and papers within, sealing them back inside their casings. He shooed the teen off the crate he'd been sitting on so he could restack it with the others, and tugged the tarp back down for protection. "I just like knowing the _odds_ of anything that had a high probability of backfiring _horribly_ at the worst possible time."

Aerrow gave the pilot an unsure look, decided it had _probably_ been a joke, and uttered a "heh" in response. "Oh... you forgot this one," he said, realizing that he was still holding the newspaper clipping. "Are those... all boxes full of Storm Hawks things?"

"You keep that one," Stork said, deftly tying down the tarp with a complicated knot, meant to hold against the frequent shifting of cargo in the hold during flight. "And some of them are; what was left on the Condor when I found her. It didn't seem right to throw away the stuff I couldn't use in the repairs, but I didn't want to leave it lying around either."

A cold pit hardened in Aerrow's stomach. "When you found the Condor, there weren't...?"

Anticipating where that was leading, Stork was quick to shake his head. "_No_. No bodies, everyone— must have bailed out before." Even still, he looked spooked, which didn't settle Aerrow's nerves much. Then again, he reflected, Stork said that he'd been on the grounded carrier for years — Aerrow wasn't sure he believed in ghosts, but that was unthinkable, living in some kind of haunted ship.

"Right. Good, okay," he said, and slowly folded the newspaper clipping into a smaller square that he could tuck inside the pocket of his flight suit. "I... yeah. I'm going to go back to my room now," he said. "Uh... thanks, Stork. Goodnight."

He left the pilot to finish securing the crates, and made his way back to his bunk. Radarr had flopped over in his sleep, dislodging the blanket. Aerrow draped it back over him before deciding that his own chance at sleep would not be happening tonight, and settled in to wait for the dawn.


	2. Pretense

**Storm Hawks Extended Universe**

A series of (mostly Stork-centric) backstory and episode companion fics, loosely inspired by 100prompts on Livejournal. Written in no particular order, copious use of headcanon, shameless amounts of adoration for this series. Cross-posted at AO3.

* * *

**Pretense (#14 - Echo)  
Notes: **Pre-series, takes place approximately three months prior to "Age of Heroes".  
**Summary:** While studying for his Sky Knight trial, Aerrow has some doubts about his newly chosen path, and Stork wants to make sure their leader gets back on course.

_"You're the last descendant of Lightning Strike. That means by right, you take leadership of the Storm Hawks. Aerrow, you're a Sky Knight!"_

* * *

The door to the bridge _whiss-thunked_ open to admit him, and Aerrow rubbed the back of his neck to ease the tension knot there from hours of bending over his books. Despite the Condor's moored state for the night, Stork had yet to leave the bridge, and the helmsman was kneeling next to the helm's service panel, the protective metal grate already removed. He looked up at the redhead's entrance, one ear cocking curiously at the teen.

"Hey," Aerrow said. "Do you mind if I study up here for a while? The others are playing a game of Guess The Species down in the common room, and it's pretty distracting."

"Finn doing his impression of a Dread-Snot giantess is usually more _horrifying_ than _distracting_," Stork replied blithely, pulling his toolkit closer and turning to lay on his back so he could work his upper body into the small space inside the junction box. He waved an absent four-fingered hand in Aerrow's direction and the bridge's navigation table, the metal distorting his answer into a hollow echo. "Knock yourself out, man, I'm going to be at this for a while."

Aerrow sniggered a little at the remark, pulled up a chair and opened the his book to where he'd left off. _All right, where was I? So if one skimmer is travelling at 75 tics per hour and covers 19 leagues, and a second skimmer traveling in the opposite direction goes 110 tics per hour and covers 40 leagues, at what point will..._

He worked on the problems for over an hour, the steady sounds of Stork's mechanical work melding with the rumblings of metal stresses when the Condor swayed against the night breeze. Finally he laid aside the book and stood, stretching his arms over his head until they gave a satisfying _pop_. Approaching the junction box, he crouched down next to what was visible of his pilot's lower half. "Whatcha working on in there?"

"Helm hydraulics," Stork answered promptly, patting his hand along the deck plate near his left hip and locating the angle clamp he'd set down earlier. "I've been _meaning_ to rerun all the lines for _weeks_, but it's not something I wanted to try when there's a good chance we'd be _shot_ at without notice."

A wry grin quirked the Sky Knight hopeful's mouth. "Occupational hazard?" he offered, and then gave an outright laugh when Stork gave a full-body twitch in response. "Were the hydraulics not working?" he added, having not noticed any degradation in the ship's handling.

"They were… _usable_," the merb allowed, followed by a grumble as a bolt refused to tighten properly, and he shifted to point in the general direction of his toolkit. "But they were almost on their last legs _already_, I just spliced together the best pieces as I pulled them out of the second helm when I was rebuilding her. Hand me that dial caliper?"

"Second helm?" Aerrow blinked, looking up at the steering handlebars in puzzlement. He hesitated only a moment before choosing the tool and settling it into the outstretched green hand.

"Thanks," Stork said, and used it to cap off the line he'd been working on. Deciding that the conversation was a good enough reason for a break, he leveraged his shoulders back out of the junction and then sat up. He had a smear of grease on one side of his face, unnoticed. "Cirrus-class carriers were originally built with dual helms," he continued, nodding to a welded-over piece of decking a dozen feet away, opposite the helm he was working on. "It might not seem like it _now_ in comparison to the huge cruisers that've been built in recent decades, but a century ago? The Condor was a _big_ carrier, and she's heavy. Having two helms with separate hydraulic systems made her both easier to fly, and safer if one was damaged."

"Makes sense," Aerrow allowed. "Guess I've just gotten used to the way you fly her, that's all." Stork made a pleased noise that he tried and failed to disguise as a harrumph, which the redhead pretended not to notice as he continued, "So why'd you pull the second one out, if it can still fly with just one?"

"I needed the parts," Stork shrugged. "And I didn't figure I'd need a double helm when I expected to be flying her alone. It's the same reason I routed the primary blaster array through the helm as well, instead of the gunner's bulk."

Giving a singular pilot a way to simultaneously steer the ship and defend itself at the same time, Aerrow thought; Stork really had anticipated leaving the Wastelands with the Condor by himself all those years he'd been stuck down there. The teen didn't like that train of thought, so he reached for a clean-ish rag from the toolbox and offered it to his helmsman. "You've got something on your face, buddy. New cruisers use a different type of system, right? You ever thought about changing it over? I mean... _eventually_ we'll have enough money for better parts for you to work with."

Stork took the proffered cloth and scrubbed absently at his cheek — completely missing the grease spot — and tossed the rag back into the toolbox. "Liquefied crystal," he agreed. "It's able to withstand a lot more heat, so you have to replace it _maybe_ once or twice in the entire lifespan of a carrier. _But_ if you spring a leak, the entire system de-pressurizes instantly... not much of a problem on a vacation cruiser, _way_ more of a problem in the middle of a battle. A liqui-crystal system isn't as responsive by almost a _full_ second. Even if I had the parts, I wouldn't change the Condor's hydraulics over... I like her the way she is."

Aerrow just shook his head, amused at the passionate defense of the carrier before standing and offering Stork a hand, then pulling the pilot upright as well. "Well, no one knows the Condor better than you do, so whatever you think is best. Have you got a minute to check the work I did?"

"Sure. Read them out to me while I wash up?"

Aerrow did so, going through the problems one by one, giving the numbers and then waiting for Stork to calculate them and give him the answer, usually in less than a minute. Piper had tried to explain why Stork was able to do math like this in his head without seeing the numbers — something about Merbian math being based on 4's instead of 10's — but it still made Aerrow baffle at the pilot's ability to do so.

_"How about **you** take the Sky Knight trial,"_ the teen had grumped in pure frustration after consistently getting every question wrong, one morning shortly after his study materials had arrived from Atmosia.

_"Because,"_ Stork had deadpanned back, without missing a beat. _"**I'm** not the one the shape-changers came looking for with cryptic prophecies. **And** if I'm the best candidate for Sky Knight we've got_—_"_ He'd given a dramatic, tragic sigh of defeat. _"We'd all be better off just surrendering to Cyclonia."_

The theatrics had derailed Aerrow's frustration effectively; he'd laughed, gone back to his studying, and only after the fact by several hours realized that had probably been the intent.

He'd gotten better since then however, and when he'd finished reading this set, it turned out he's gotten the majority of questions right. The few that he'd missed were simple calculation error, as much a fault of the late hour as anything. "Thanks, Stork. I feel like this is taking me forever to learn. I've never had to… think this much about _how_ stuff works. I always just kind of... did it."

The green helmsman shook his head disbelievingly. "_Slow?_ Most hopefuls train for _years_ before they're able to take their trial, Aerrow— and you're doing yours in less than six months. Your definition of _slow_ is a little short of zero bank."

"It's not the book stuff I'm worried about," Aerrow replied, settling his hand to the back of his neck in what Stork had come to recognize as a gesture of uncertainty and nerves. "It's the stuff I _can't_ study for that's making me..."

"Like what, the combat challenge? You and Piper have been sparring every day."

"Like..."

The leader dropped back into his chair and looked up at Stork, who waited expectantly without interrupting, until Aerrow groaned heavily at having to put his thoughts into words. "Like having to demonstrate a special move, for starters. I still haven't done one successfully, and I'm running out of time before the trials. What if... they figure out who I'm— what if they _expect_ me to be like Lightning Strike, and what if I'm _not_? And there's probably going to be people there who lost teammates in the battle ten years ago, so what if they blame me for... for something, _I don't know._"

The teen lapsed into silence with a frustrated clench of his fist, while the only sound on the bridge was the quiet rush of the wind outside against the glass. Finally he forced out, "What if no one _wants_ the Storm Hawks back?"

"You're probably right."

The casual agreement was enough to startle Aerrow into silence, and for a moment he was certain he'd heard that incorrectly, except for the expression on the merb's face that confirmed he hadn't. "Well, uh... I am?"

"Being a Sky Knight is a terrible job," Stork shook his head, pacing back and forth, gesturing at the clouds beyond the bridge. "Highest probability of losing _life_ and _limb_ in the whole Atmos, and not necessarily in that order. Likelihood of dying before you turn thirty? _Over sixty-five percent_— maimed is over _seventy-five percent_! Dying in an accident involving a poorly functioning Nimbus afterburner on your skimmer? One in 17.5 deployments. Assuming you ride your skimmer twice day, you'll last about two and a half weeks. And _sure_, some squads get treated like celebrities on their home terras, but _most_ of the time, they might as well just paint a target on their backs and _fly around_ Cyclonian airspace with a _big sign_. There are a lot easier ways to chase fame, Aerrow."

"I'm not chasing fame!" the redhead protested, baffled and caught off guard by the slew of negativity from the pilot. "I just want to protect other terras, the way we were protecting our home on Neverlandis."

"You could protect other terras by developing a better microbe scrub, there's a shortage in the whole eastern region. People would definitely appreciate that more than a group of teenagers flying around. I can show you germination reports from the last five years, it's getting absolutely _plaguelike_ over there."

"That's not what I—"

"Or a bog-howler anti-chewing repellent test subject." Stork pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Of course, that doesn't get you out of the whole _losing limbs_ problem..."

"Uh, pass. I just thought that—"

"Sky Knighthood is a thankless career. You'd be better off becoming a used skimmer salesman."

"I'm not doing it for _thanks_," Aerrow snapped. "Would you knock it _off_, Stork? You're acting like I _care_ what other people think of me!"

The pilot held up three fingers, and lowered one, followed by the second, and just as he was about to do the same with the third, Aerrow's realization came. The angry tension he hadn't even realized that was gathering across the line of his shoulders dissipated, leaving him feeling surprisingly light. An exasperated laugh whooshed out of him, and he shook his head wryly.

"Okay, okay, I get it. But really, bog-howler repellent tester? You just made that up to make your point, right?"

"Clearly you've never been on a terra where bog howlers are a serious problem," Stork answered, bending to collect his toolkit from the floor. He set it on the table and looked at the teen. "This is one of those areas where you _are_ better off _doing_ instead of thinking, Aerrow. Who cares what people are going to think of you becoming a Sky Knight, or putting the Storm Hawks back together? You're not doing it for them."

"I'm doing it for the Atmos, but... it's because I want to protect all of us here on the Condor... this team, right here. I can't do that if I'm worrying about what other people are thinking."

The merb nodded, glad that the leader had cleared his head, and it was that kind of dedication that allowed Stork to _think_ of Aerrow as a leader, even though he was several years younger. It was something that Stork hadn't had a lot of experience with, because of the social structure of his home terra, followed by years of solitude in the Wastelands. Yet he was finding he didn't mind... just as long as Aerrow didn't lose sight of his even keel.

"Think there's any dessert left?" the redhead asked, gathering his books and jerking a finger over his shoulder in the direction of the common area, where he realized that the commotion from the guessing game had died down. "You coming?"

Stork demurred, wanting to clean up first, and Aerrow left the bridge a moment later, his step noticeably lighter on the deck plates than it had been when he'd come in. As the bridge door closed behind him, the pilot just shook his head bemusedly, and dimmed the lights for the night.

* * *

**Zero bank** \- A flight dynamic that refers to an aircraft on a "flat" or horizontal level, where the normal force is vertically upwards.


End file.
